Tilemaps for SpriteKit & Cocos2D with built-in GameplayKit features

Discontinued Projects: Kobold2D, KoboldTouch and Kobold Kit

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You may still find the content you were looking for here.

Here’s a list of content that’s no longer available on the original location due to kobold2d.com, koboldtouch.com and koboldkit.com now being offline. If you miss anything in particular that’s not in this list, please contact me at: steffen [at] learn-cocos2d.com

Note: OpenGW as an Entity-Component-System framework was never released publicly, and in the meantime has been made quite superfluous by Apple’s GameplayKit. However some of the concepts may find their way into TilemapKit.

About TilemapKit

With all the above projects (Kobold2D, KoboldTouch, Kobold Kit), I tried to make an engine that’s better and easier and more convenient to use than the one that already existed (Cocos2D, Sprite Kit). In parts I succeeded while in other areas my efforts really didn’t matter that much yet were time consuming to implement.

Of course, with each new project I took what I learned from the last, and applied it to the new one. Personally I think those improvements showed when moving from Kobold2D to KoboldTouch to KoboldKit.

The next revelation was to get rid of the whole “trying to make a complete/improved game engine” concept. The result: TilemapKit, a framework for developing tilemap games.

The whole engine thing just adds too much maintenance and documentation requirements, and doesn’t create very convincing feature bullet-points (hear, hear: you can now push & pop scenes in Sprite Kit, woo-hooo!). Plus those are projects which will remain in the shadow of the original project. It’s really hard to stand out, and to convince developers to “change sides”. A compelling tool devs can add to their toolbin, however … that’s what TilemapKit is.

KoboldKit should still be largely operational but I haven’t run it in a year and I heard it has some problems with iOS 8 or Swift. If you would like to contribute and improve Kobold Kit, or even take ownership of the project, please contact me at steffen [at] learn-cocos2d.com.